Cyberpunk 2077 – CD Projekt Red | #digital culture

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is one of the most important premieres of the past few years, on par with ‘Read Dead Redemption 2’ or ‘Death Stranding’. It will be a reference point for upcoming RPG games, as was the case with ‘The Witcher’.

CD Projekt Red was already known for two of its games in The Witcher series, and firing up for a third instalment, which was supposed to blow its two previous games out of the water. So, when it announced plans to create a digital adaptation of the RPG tabletop game Cyberpunk, many were surprised.

First of all, because the company had never made games not situated within Sapkowki’s books, and second of all, because whilst the Cyberpunk game was beloved by RPG fans, wider audiences had never heard of it.

A year later, the idea for a computerised Cyberpunk had taken on some shape – the first trailer was released. It didn’t show off the game, just an animated clip created by Platige Image, accompanied by the hypnotising song Bullets, by Archive. In the trailer, a group of policemen attack a seemingly unarmed woman – only when the first slo-mo bullet hits her in the cheek and bounces off in fragments do we realise that in this case she’s the predator, and the policemen are the prey. The Internet went wild – the first trailer of a game no one knew anything about quickly became a hit (to this day it’s racked up 23 million views). The trailer ends with, ‘COMING: WHEN IT’S READY’. No one, not even the game’s creators, knew that the premiere would only occur almost eight years later.

During this long wait, the game itself sometimes was less important than the media spectacle around it – this was the case at the E3 Expo in 2019, when everyone found out (with a huge roar from the crowd and online participants) that one of the main roles will be played by Keanu Reeves. The scene has written its way into the history books of video gaming. Players’ expectations were colossal. The premiere turned out to be one of largest of its kinds in history, not only in Poland – Cyberpunk beat out the best-selling record of the newest instalment of World of Warcraft with lighting speed. When players finally booted up the game, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction – Cyberpunk was hit with a wave of criticism, especially for the obviously too early console release, full of glitches.

Projekt Red’s leaders apologised to gamers and promised quick fixes, which haven’t taken place. The Internet continues to roil with angry comments, poor reviews and (what certainly stings the most) memes about the game’s faults. Until the glitches are fixed, the game has been removed from Playstation stores. Viewers who watch from the sidelines may feel lost. What is Cyberpunk ultimately like?

I played the PC version, in which glitches still occur, but do not ruin the experience – I ran into some levitating scenery and a window, which upon approaching throws the player back 100 metres, but no larger problems. When it comes to gameplay itself, it’s not as excellent as The Witcher 3 was at its premiere. There, the issues lay in some technical bugs, but the whole experience was an example of harmonious interplay between gameplay and story. In Cyberpunk, there are plenty of incredibly ambitious ideas that are not fully realised, as if the scale of the project outgrew its creators.

The Witcher 3 took the formula from its previous games and placed it in an open world – that was certainly a dive into the deep end. But Cyberpunk makes quite a few of these dives. It’s in part an action game viewed through the main character’s eyes, partially a puzzle, in other ways something similar to GTA, and all of these elements had not been part of a previous CDPR project.

And yet – I don’t doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most important premieres of the fast few years, on par with Red Dead Redemption 2 or Death Stranding. It will be a reference point for upcoming RPG games, as was the case with The Witcher. There will be plenty of games that imitate it, but few people will succeed. Because despite all the things that didn’t quite work out (including those that will be fixed in future patches, and those that will remain) CP2077 is an impressive feat that few other companies would have attempted to pull off.

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ – CD Projekt Red – Image Gallery

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Although the main character is in theory ‘V’ (the character generator allows for quite a bit of freedom in creating them), the real hero is the city, well known to lovers of the tabletop version of Cyberpunk: Night City. Its most important element is its numerous layers – born as the utopian project of a philanthropic businessman, and after his death at the hands of unknown killers fell into worst straits: wars between gangsters and corporations, an atom bomb that destroyed the whole centre, further economic crises… Out of all of this came a diverse city, where districts changed character and purpose – a great example of this is Pacifica, built as an elegant and luxurious suburb, but in 2077 turning into a poor, dilapidated area, with buildings sometimes abandoned before they were complete.

There are plenty of examples of great cities in video games, but none can compare to Night City. For many reasons – one of them being how detailed it is. Newspapers blow across streets, piles of trash bags lie behind stores, streets in rich districts are well maintained, in poor ones – cracked and full of potholes, filled with puddles after a rain, and when I move closer to examine a mud-spattered paper left behind between empty bottles, I find a long letter someone printed to cheer themselves up. When we raise our gaze, Night City becomes even more interesting, because it wasn’t built like a standard game element, but like a town, first designed, later growing of its own accord. This multi-level labyrinth of highways and sidewalks has its own rhythm, everything in its place – from the streets of luxury stores to the hidden corners, which are better avoided.

I have a weakness for walking around in unknown towns, and as an experienced flâneur, Night City hit no false notes. This is a dream come true for all digital flâneurs – you wont find a better place to wander in any other game. Certain districts have distinguishable architectural styles, and if we want to take a breather, we can leave the city – either to the desert, or to the refineries in the north, or even to the mountains, which turn out to be giant landfills surrounding Night City. From there, there is a beautiful vista of the town, accompanied by columns of light used for advertising.

Thumbnail — Still from 'Cyberpunk 2077', 2020, photo: CD Projekt Red

Night City is halfway between our everyday reality and an uneasy future. Streets filled with trash, elegant stores or abandoned bars are like those found in America, but when we walk through them, we pass a mega-building – designed for thousands of people, where even in broad daylight, it’s completely dark. The medical centre in Night City is a behemoth, capable of being taken in fully only from a distance. Outside of town, greenhouses stretch out for kilometres – these are the mechanised farms of the Biotechnica company. Part of it is surrounded by a thick wall, so that no one can see what is happening inside. Outside of the wall lies a wrecked car, next to it bodies that no one managed to bury.

On first view, the world of Cyberpunk doesn’t look like a classic cyberpunk dystopia – rather like a contemporary city. Yet it’s worth paying attention to the commercials, where one can see the world’s callousness and brutality. ‘Do you hate your body?’ is the tagline for an advertisement showing a man ripping the skin off his face. Commercials are non-stop inundated with narcotics, weapons, pornography and parts of the body available for sale – commodities like any other. In one of the first missions, we save a highly positioned employee of a corporation from the hands of a gang, which murders people for their implants. She’s in difficult condition – it’s uncertain whether she’ll live. When the ambulance flies to meet her, the armed-to-the-teeth medics keep a watchful eye on us; the woman had bought the luxury packet, so it was important no unauthorised people approached her.

The beginnings of cyberpunk were formed in opposition to the Reagan-era cult of capitalism – it’s exactly this dramatised world of rebels versus capitalist overlords that appears in the game. The giant companies in Cyberpunk – Arasaka, Militech, Biotechnica – rule the city with an iron fist, sometimes effectively, sometimes not, but always brutally. Night City is not always a serious vision of the future, but rather a biting satire of technology and money.

The creators at CD Projekt Red became world-famous for their excellent storytelling and characters. Here Cyberpunk followed in the footsteps of The Witcher – the driving story pulls us in for a moment, but the city is full of smaller and larger stories waiting to be discovered as well. The starting point is typical for the classic cyberpunk genre. The main character makes money by manoeuvring between the powerful players in the city, doing jobs for them from time to time, and growing increasingly independent. It reminds me of the heroes from Raymond Chandler’s noir novels – and, of course, Geralt, a character also heavily inspired by Chandler. The game’s stories aren’t particularly ground-breaking; they follow well-known tropes, but they do so with such virtuosity that it’s hardly noticeable.

The characters, viewed this time from a first-person point of view, seem even closer than in CDP Red’s previous projects – you can touch them, sit down next to them at a bar and down a glass of whiskey together, reminiscing on friends gone by. It’s easy to become authentically attached to them, and the game cleverly develops these relationships, first connecting with players and then betraying them.

A few scenes in Cyberpunk have stuck in my memory, but none more so than the ones that are so difficult to pull off in a computer game – the ones that are friendly and intimate. An evening spent with friends around a campfire. A coffee that a friend meant to prepare for us in the evening, but forgot until the morning, so we drink it whilst watching the toxic yet beautiful waves in the lake outside of town. A toast at the wake of a friend who died for no reason. Everything is interwoven harmoniously – well-written dialogues, animated faces and gestures, the actor’s voices, showing the body of our protagonist, which helps us better identify with them… interacting with the game’s characters, next to the size and detail of the city, will certainly be one of the fondly remembered aspects by those who are inspired by Cyberpunk in future games.

This all came out wonderfully – but there are other elements in Cyberpunk that did not. The game’s creators didn’t want to limit themselves in any way, and they included mechanics that could have been split up into a few different games. When we fight opponents, we can attack from a distance, firing from our rifles, or rush them with superspeed and mechanically augmented legs, using knives inserted under our skin – or hide in the shadows and surprise them one by one, or hack into the cybernetic system connected to their brains and bodies… To create a good game based on each of these concrete styles, you have to think about the specific spaces fights occur in and enemy behaviours that adapt to the player’s choices.

Creating a game where you can make use of each style at will is incredibly difficult – few pull it off. An example would be the Dishonored collection by Arkane. No one has managed it in an open world. The result – although the Cyberpunk mechanics have incredible potential – is far from perfect. One of the problems is the opponents, who are able to shoot accurately when they see us, but when we hide behind a corner, they wander aimlessly and are easily hacked – since all it takes is leaning out for a second. To create a more interesting experience, I would wander out into the open, and the fight would once more become exciting.

After playing Cyberpunk, I thought back to different games where I had a similar experience – a fascinating world, story and characters, as well as incomplete mechanics and ambitions, glitches that made gameplay difficult. It turned out that the closest example was the 1999 Deus Ex (which Cyberpunk pulls from) and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines from 2004. In Deus Ex, the opponents, to put it kindly, also didn’t show the greatest intelligence, and it was often easy to beat them due to their lack of capabilities. Bloodlines, on the other hand, was full of small and great technical errors, sneak and fight mechanics were simply horrible, and one of the final bosses was impossible to beat without cheats because he was added to the game in a great hurry, since the premiere was approaching.

Both Deus Ex and Bloodlines are now iron-clad classics, a template for future generations. Another case of excessive ambitions is the series STALKER, likewise a cult classic. They were made in a time when high-budget games were more ambitious and pointless than the ones now – sometimes they chased so many ideas, they couldn’t keep up with them all.

Sure, I’m aware of all the faults – but these are the games I like the most.

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